I wonder why monsters never practice good hygiene. Is it just that hard for Godzilla to get an appropriately sized toothbrush? Or is it really that good to have gobbets of flesh stuck between your incisors?
A cursed heart from Africa – a bit of a conceptual pun in itself – is at the heart of another movie that, surprisingly, didn’t suck: Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (2007). The story concerns the travails of plumber Jack Brooks, a man whose childhood loss of his parents and sister on a camping trip to forest monsters has left him with anger management issues. Now a young man, when the professor of his night course in chemistry asks him to check into a plumbing problem at his recently purchased house, Jack stumbles into a mess that his raging anger may actually play a positive part: the cursed heart, imported from Africa decades ago and messing with the house’s plumbing, breaks free and infects the professor.
And now it’s hungry.
Two classes later, the professor loses his fight to the heart and is transformed into a clown-like monster that begins to drain the life from the students in his course, a sensation no doubt familiar to many of my readers. There is much running about, screaming, and a few new monsters are birthed through transformation. Think how parasitic wasps use paralyzed spiders to implant their larvae, which then eat the still-live spider –
Yeah, maybe not. The analogy may be imperfect.
Yes, that would be a petard.
But Jack the Plumber strikes back, and in an epic battle extinguishes the monster, even hoisting it on its own petard, as Jack creates for himself a new career.
Monster Slayer.
This could have been awful, rotten, terrible. It’s not. Fifteen minutes in, I turned to my Arts Editor and exclaimed, “This doesn’t suck!” And then we stayed up ’til 2AM watching the whole silly thing, enjoying the humor, appreciating the professional acting (even the bloody dog did a fabulous job!), getting into the organic plot, and razzing the slightly cheesy monster costumes and special effects.
I’m not going to recommend it. This isn’t, say, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). But it’s nicely put together, and if you like comedic horror, this little fragment of a gemstone might be right up your alley.
